Languages

Language learning software has never been particularly “sexy,” nor have its makers managed to produce a bounty of memorable user experiences, for that matter. While it might not be quite ready for the former, Duolingo is fast-becoming the poster child of a new generation of language learning products that are actually enjoyable to use, and able to combine fun with function.
In… Read More

Perl, that boon to the Linux hacker and confuser of non-monks, is 25 years old today. Larry Wall, creator of Perl, released the first version of the ahr language on December 18, 1987 (although Perl 0 existed, Wall refuses to tell when he created it). You could argue that Perl has been overshadowed by other languages like PHP and Python, but every programmer knows there’s nothing like a… Read More

Google just announced that it has added Cherokee as Gmail’s 57th supported language. While Google has continuously expanded its language support for Gmail and its other services, this marks the first time that Google has added a Native American tribal language to its repertoire. Read More

Google, along with the rest of the Internet, may be partly responsible for how ubiquitous English has become, but Google is also trying to counterbalance that by making it easier for people to interact in other languages. Among the latest moves, the search giant has created a tool that automatically translates Arabizi — Roman-character based Arabic language slang — back into… Read More

To paraphrase the late great David Foster Wallace, did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of software development reveals ideological strife and fanaticism on a nearly Godwin’s-law scale? Did you know that software development even had a seamy underbelly? It does, and its name is PHP, the world’s least-loved but arguably most-used programming language.
It’s… Read More

In response to Facebook’s ever-expanding social universe and the success of mobile-focused networks like Instagram, Dave Morin and company have turned Path into a more personal, mobile-centric social network.
Most of the life-sharing that happens on Path takes place at home — among family and close friends. And while some users may speak one language away from home or at work… Read More

Google, along with other major forces of our dot-com times, has played a huge part in making English the lingua franca of the Internet, but today brings news of an effort it’s making to counterbalance that, at least a little. It is kicking off the Endangered Languages Project, a site for interested groups and individuals to share research and collaborate on projects to help preserve… Read More

Pretty important day in the history of the World Wide Web, if not the Internet as a whole. ICANN, sorta the Internet’s regulator, will for the first time now allow non-Latin characters for Web addresses. That means that, if we wanted, sometime in the future we could register a Russian version of CrunchGear.com at KPYHЧГИP.PYC (that’s just an example, who knows what the… Read More

Tamir Khason wrote an article about four years ago theorizing that there’s a direct correlation between the modern-day popularity of a particular programming language and how much facial hair the inventor of that language has. He’s now revisited the subject in a new post called Computer Languages and Facial Hair — Take Two.
The inventors of the following languages have (or… Read More

Latest Crunch Report

There’s an interesting (and somewhat long) read over on eWeek.com for those of you that get a little moist about declarative programming languages. Microsoft’s “Oslo” strategy, announced in October, has given way to a new programming language currently known only as “D” that’ll pass the “two-beer test” — as in, it’ll supposedly… Read More

The Tower of Babel translator is a prototype translation device that functions in a completely different fashion from existing translators. Rather than having users punch in words on a keypad and then get back a computery sounding voice, the Tower of Babel works by hooking electrodes to the users face. The electrode are able to monitor facial expressions and then issue translations when it… Read More